Chapter 16: The benefits of Mind.
Trent found little challenge against the newest Morels now that he could easily kill them without risk. So he rushed into the next zone. Well, not totally rushed. His new destructive power just made him all the more aware how squishy he was. He almost regretted neglecting Vitality with his free points, seeing as it was now his lowest stat. But the small number of extra points wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
What might well save his life, though, was the armor molds he had made for Create. It included full coverage on all body parts, and he had altered the Skill to create the constructs directly on his body. No need to design ways to take them on and off! Oh, and the entire Skill he made in lieu of defense might help a bit.
Skill Name: Void Attack
Energy is stilled. Power is negated. Concepts find no purchase in the void. This Skill automatically activates when the user’s soul believes an attack would kill them. The attack is nullified and voided. Has one charge before it must be recharged with your will.
Despite taking him as much time to make as Levitation, this Skill represented the culmination of his Skill creation skills. It used the defensive net permeating his being from Catalyst of Cataclysm, but instead of a concept that prevented his own attacks from harming him, it instead used a stockpile of void to negate an enemy's attack.
The stockpile was somewhat reminiscent of DESTROY, but much more controlled. The vortex of void was also his first attempt at replicating concepts. The spinning willpower was changed and partially separated from him, infusing it with the meaning of turning a singular attack into nothing.
It was actually here he discovered a key part of the nature of willpower. Using large amounts of it was generally far less efficient than a slow stream. This would have become obvious much earlier, but the nature of willpower was hard to quantify and literally relied on his mood and mindset. His increased Mind certainly helped though.
On the topic of his Mind stat, he generally didn’t use it outside of boosting the speed of his thoughts. But Mind was more than that. It couldn’t truly increase intelligence—that depended on the individual, he assumed—but it could allow him to keep more things in his mind and make complex calculations. Such as experience gain. He wasn’t close to fully understanding it, but some backtracking revealed that the levels and difficulty of his enemies didn’t make all that much of a difference.
Oh, did that mean he had leveled up? Nah, he actually had a sense of how close he was to the next level. It was really vague before, but it seemed to take a bit more of a jump when he added three of his free points into Mind. Even when fighting foes almost as low as him—gasp—he still gained close to a quarter of what he would when facing the level-appropriate versions.
The illusion of stronger monsters giving exp jumps had already sort of been figured out. It was due to variety. Every new monster gave a big boost when he first encountered them, but that dropped of kind of quickly. This plus the additional danger of the unknown made it seem like each monster was far better for experience than the ones before it.
In actuality, they were only a bit juicier than lower ‘tier’ enemies at the same level even though they were far, far stronger. Even Failed World Spirit Golems were quite a bit stronger than Yellow Knights. So, the cost for each level wasn’t increasing exponentially, it was just that the experience his enemies gave was climbing really slowly.
Kind of annoying! He wasn’t sure if this was something to do with the nature of these creatures, but he confirmed that the ‘bonus’ experience a Morel Mentis gave was dropping significantly slower than the less sentient enemies. It was quite likely that the ‘normal’ experience progression in this system was being hampered by the copy-and-paste nature of the enemies he faced.
But that made sense. There was no challenge or real danger in fights he could predict unless he made a stupid mistake, and this system could well assume he would never make one. A foolish error, if that was the case. If there was no challenge, it didn’t have much meaning, so there would be less ‘experience’. It was logical, but he wished it didn’t hamper him so much.
Although, maybe it was actually a good thing? It forced him to slow down, so he would train more in between every Skill choice, which would result in better Skills. If leveling up was easier he doubted he would be able to restrain himself from picking subpar Skills. Technically, he had chosen subpar Skills this entire time because he could have gotten better ones with a bunch more training.
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But it just wasn’t reasonable. He was already practically inhuman for his ability to work on Skills for days and weeks at a time. There was simply no way he had the mental strength to delay his Skill choice for that long. Actually, could he unlock more Skills while he had a Skill pick available? He would have to check that once he reached level 20.
...you know what, screw rushing into the next zone. He was going to take an entire 30 religious experiences to train before he rushed ahead, and not one less. It would be a pain, but such was the price for real power. This was well within his limits, so why not push for the most optimal routine.
So he trained. He had basically stopped his throwing training at this point, as he had hit that point where there weren’t any more obvious things that could be improved with his form. Compared to his Skills, it was also pretty dull.
He improved all his percentage boosts somewhat, and even refined the structure of DESTROY to boost the speed and efficiency of the conversion to pure destruction. Power Throw had hit 879% a huge jump from 643%, and the boosted mode of Catalyst had reached 410%. The changes to Flurry Throw were more interesting.
Skill Name: Flurry Throw
Activate to unleash a barrage of throwing projectiles. Increases the effective agility for each throw and the motion of grabbing throwing ammunition by 1844%. Uses a little bit of void power and a miniscule amount of stamina. Can be combined with other throwing Skills.
Unlike all his other system-given Skills, Flurry Throw was the only one that he altered the main structure of. Instead of simply having an extra and far superior mode when he used willpower, the Skill simply could no longer be used without fueling it with willpower. It also had less of a numerical increase than his other Skill enhancements in exchange for entirely new functionality.
He had also made two entirely new Skills.
Skill Name: Condense Will
Changes your willpower into a void energy that can be used in addition to your normal willpower to increase the power of Skills fueled by it. The generated energy is stored inside the Skill.
Skill Name: Void Beholder
Form your will into a sphere with wings. The beholder can fly freely and is completely controlled by you. You can project various senses through the beholder.
The first Skill was originally intended to be a storage for his normal willpower, but he always knew in his gut that the strange ‘energy’ didn’t work like that. So he repurposed it into a power booster, which was arguably even better. The whole thing leaned heavily into his knowledge of conceptual attunement.
The beholder was a brainchild that had spun out of control. He didn’t need a scout Skill in any way, shape, or form. But he got a bit too into it, and it wasn’t like it was a total waste of a Skill. It was fun to use, being a bit like a drone linked to his mind. His mental state was arguably the most important thing after survival, after all. It was also good practice for when he created more useful Skills.
The beholder opened up a new avenue for testing the demons and monsters. Most of them still attacked without much change in their patterns, but the lack of risk to himself meant that he could be far freer with his experiments. It was nowhere near as stressful as baiting them in person, as well. For some reason, the idea of holding back against an enemy, however weak, made him really worried. It felt like he was tempting fate.
The beholder made it easier to do some comprehensive testing on the stats of the various enemy types. The results weren’t all that surprising. For example, a Morel Finisis had around 6 stats per level, in the magic stats and what seemed like Vitality and Agility. Seemed like, because it could have had different stats for speed and durability on account of its ghostly nature.
It also seemed that none of the non-sentient monsters had that many points in the last three magical stats—Control, Connection, and Perception. Of course, they could easily be too subtle of changes for him to notice. Outside of Perception, which was just hard for him to discern, the other two were quite vague. Especially Connection. The dump stats helped them seem like they had enormous stat totals.
The progression for each evolution was quite simple as well. Lost Velders had 8 per level but they were spread into all of the physical stats except Mind. Fudasha had 9. Abyssal grunts had 13, but almost half of those were put in Vitality. Yellow Knights were the opposite, having only 10 stats per level but powerful abilities. It was possible that they had invested in Connection and Control, but he doubted it. The abilities they used were too rigid to rely on Control, like all the others. All but one.
The World Spirits had over 20, but their size meant that it was too diluted to do much good. He paused at that thought, looking over at a golem within his render distance. That thing had... barely five times his stats. Really put things into perspective how strong, and weak he really was.
The big exception was the latest type of Morel. Morel Mentis. They had around 15 stats, including some in all of the magical ones. The investment in Connection and Control was probably why they had differences in their magic, and the whole reason they could use it flexibly. They also definitely had a point in Mind every couple of levels.
Look at all of this neat stuff he could use Void Beholder for! It was definitely worth making. Let’s see what the next monster was, and what studying it would tell him!